Boot Hill: Prologue

Ah, Friday nights were always best. Or that's what Kakashi Hatake thought to himself as he worked alongside his friend Kurenai Yuhi on putting the finishing touches on a massive role-playing game campaign that the two of them had been planning for over a month now. The two elite ninja masters were extremely excited to introduce their pupils to this new tabletop game. Well, it was actually a very old role-playing game, in fact it was one of the oldest ones ever published. But the kids hadn't played it yet, so it was new to them! Kakashi quietly hummed the tune to Marty Robbins' "Big Iron" under his breath while Kurenai finished drawing the last of the campaign world maps that she and Kakashi had so meticulously planned out on many sheets of graph paper.

"So, Kakashi, how many of your students are going to be playing in this campaign?"

"All three of them. Normally getting Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura to all three agree on anything is like herding cats, but getting them to agree to play a tabletop role-playing game was surprisingly easy. How about you, Kurenai?"

"Well, Hinata and Kiba are definitely playing. Hinata's never played any RPG's before, but she is definitely interested in getting into the hobby and while Shino does play D&D, he said he had no interest in the Wild West as a game setting and decided to sit this one out. Shino is a very good role-player, but if he doesn't enjoy tales of cowboys and the open frontier, I can't fault him for wanting to sit this campaign out."

"Alright, that gives us five players. I can work with that. Do you know what time they'll be getting here? I told my students to be here at 4:00 PM, so they should be here pretty soon."

"I gave them the same time you did, oddly enough. So we should have the full group together within the next ten minutes or so."

"Excellent."

After Kurenai and Kakashi had laid out the maps and set the tables for their prospective players, suddenly a knock was heard on the classroom door.

"Come in."

In walked Sasuke, Sakura, and Naruto, with Kiba and Hinata following closely behind. The five of them immediately grabbed some chairs and sat down at various places among the plain gray gaming table that had been set up by the two ninja masters.

"I'm so excited to play this game, believe it!" said Naruto with an upbeat air of excitement in his voice.

"We know, Naruto. You wouldn't shut up about it for the last fifteen minutes!" replied Sasuke begrudgingly.

"Easy now, Sasuke. Naruto is just excited to be playing a new game, and there's nothing wrong with that. As a Game Master, I appreciate that kind of enthusiasm at the table."

"Sorry, Kakashi-sensei. As annoying as Naruto can be at times, you do have a point."

"Yeah, the gaming table is one of the few places where Naruto shines." said Sakura.

Hinata raised her hand and nervously spoke up.

"Kurenai-sensei, what kind of game will we be playing and how do you create your characters in this? I'm new to all this stuff, although Kiba did explain Dungeons & Dragons to me and how it is played. But I was told we're not playing that game but a different game instead."

"Correct. We are playing a game called Boot Hill, specifically the Second Edition rules released in 1979. It is a Wild West tabletop role-playing game and it is a very easy and simple system when compared to the newer editions of Dungeons & Dragons, and indeed many other role-playing systems. You play as characters in an Old West setting and play through interactive fictional scenarios. You can be a cowboy, a lawman, a rancher, settler, a miner, a gambler, a Native American, an outlaw, one of the townsfolk, or for this particular campaign, you could even be a member of Caesar's Legion. The specific setting of this campaign is the frontier town of Promise City, located in the vast El Dorado County, located at an unspecified area in the territories of the American West."

"Neat. I always loved watching Westerns on TV with my grandparents." replied the nervous girl with a sigh of relief in her voice.

"Then you will love this game a lot, Hinata. Character creation and game mechanics are largely based on percentile dice, which we have already provided for you in case you need them. All we need from each of you is a basic character concept and then we'll roll the stats for your characters."

"I shall play a cowboy who has just arrived in Promise City after a long cattle drive." said Naruto.

"I want to play a gentleman gambler seeking his fortunes in the West. Sort of like Doc Holliday." said Sasuke.

"I'll be a saloon girl who is also the partner-in-crime of Sasuke's character. She'd be the Big Nose Kate to Sasuke's Doc Holliday." replied Sakura.

"I'll play one of the spies for Caesar's Legion, disguised as a simple miner in Promise City." said Kiba.

"I want to be a pioneer homesteader woman living in Promise City, a reluctant hero of sorts." replied Hinata.

"Excellent, I like all of the character concepts that the five of you have mentioned. Let's get this show on the road then, shall we?"

As Kakashi set up the GM's screen and readied his campaign notes, Kurenai guided the players in creating their characters.

This would be a campaign that they would not forget.

Coming Soon: A New RPG Fan Fiction Project

So I have decided to write some RPG fan fiction. Earlier in this blog, I had mentioned the project "Dead Dungeons", a crossover of Dungeons & Dragons and the Dead or Alive video game series, but development on that project has led me down a different creative rabbit hole and I have decided to write some fan fiction about the classic Wild West role-playing game Boot Hill and it would involve characters from the Naruto anime franchise.

That being said, you don't need to be all that familiar with the Naruto franchise to understand this fan fiction. I'll explain the initial premise in this quick blog post.

The fic is a story within a story. The first chapter consists of some of the main characters from the Naruto anime getting ready to play a long campaign of Boot Hill, and it serves as a framing device for the main story, which is the actual in-character events of the game. Character deaths can and will happen and the story will be written partially on the fly.

The fanfic itself will be given the simple title of Boot Hill. named for the game being played in the story and I should have a prologue chapter up fairly soon.

Boot Hill and the Western Genre

Saddle up, because for this blog article, we're heading out West to talk about one of the earliest RPG's ever made, the legendary Boot Hill, published by TSR and created by Gary Gygax and Brian Blume in 1975.

I've been a fan of the Western genre ever since I was a little kid watching old Westerns with my grandfather, and from the day I began playing RPG's, I desired an Old West-themed role-playing game. My very first D&D character that I played when I was thirteen may have been a Sorcerer, but he was dressed like a cowboy from the Wild West with his boots, broad-brimmed hat, and long duster coat. However, it wasn't until I was much older and started to get involved with the OSR and began delving deeper into the history of D&D and the greater RPG hobby that I learned about Boot Hill, TSR's second RPG after Dungeons & Dragons and one of the earliest role-playing games ever.

I briefly played in a forum-based Play-by-Post Boot Hill game that used the Second Edition rules from 1979, and I enjoyed the fuck out of it. Sadly, I had to bow out of the game due to real-life complications taking precedent.

To put it bluntly, the Easter holiday and severe weather delays threw me off and I could no longer follow what was happening. But it was fun while it lasted and I would love to play another game of Boot Hill one day.

I do not own a hard copy of the rules, but I have read scanned PDF's of both the First Edition and Second Edition rules online. I doubt that the scans were fully legal, so I'm not going to link them here or anything like that. I realize that there was a third edition of Boot Hill released in the early 90's during the heyday of Second Edition AD&D which introduced an entirely different set of game mechanics, but I have not read nor played that version of the game, so I can't really comment on it.

However, I do like the Second Edition of Boot Hill, originally released in 1979 (the first edition came out in 1975, and the third in 1990) and while I am not used to percentile-based systems, I did enjoy playing the game online and the system itself seemed fairly light. Boot Hill is notorious among gamers for two things.

One of these things is that Boot Hill is rather obscure compared to D&D and the other is that it is extremely lethal compared to D&D, with character deaths being a common occurrence by comparison. The lack of classes and levels probably adds to this reputation.

Many people give Boot Hill a lot of flak for not having as detailed of a setting or premise as other games like Dungeons & Dragons. But to be fair, the Western genre is so ingrained into our pop culture that one could make the argument that it didn't need to explain the premise of the game all that much. You could easily just watch a Western movie or TV show, or read one of those paperback dime novels.

I get the feeling that Gygax and his buddies at TSR didn't feel the need to explain the premise of Boot Hill, especially given that the Western genre was a lot more prominent in the 1970's than it is today in the 2010's.

I personally love the game, despite its sparse material and highly lethal combat system. I would love to run some campaigns or write some fan fiction based on Boot Hill in the near future.

I've also considered doing crossovers with Boot Hill and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (there's even material covering such a concept in the First Edition Dungeon Master's Guide for AD&D) and I will be covering that specific concept in another future blog post.

What's New Is Old Again-Looking Back At Vampire: The Requiem

Alright, today we're going back to the Bush years, those halcyon days of watching the first Naruto anime on Cartoon Network and playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on your Playstation 2 while listening to the entirety of Big & Rich's "Horse of a Different Color" album on repeat.

Time to put on your black jeans and studded leather belt you got at Hot Topic because for this blog post, we're going to party like it's 2005 and look back on the earliest days of Vampire: The Requiem and the New World of Darkness (or Chronicles of Darkness, as it is now called) and why I sort of want to go back to those days even more than I want to revisit the roots of Vampire: The Masquerade and the Classic World of Darkness.

I was a twelve-year old edgy weeaboo kid back in 2005 who stayed up way too late, watched too much anime, and  drank way too much caffeine. I didn't start playing role-playing games until I was thirteen years old, when my Dad bought us a copy of the Player's Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 and we started playing heavily house-ruled and imaginative campaigns.

Had I known about Vampire: The Requiem and the New World of Darkness at the time, I would have probably played those games also, as I was in search of a system for modern settings for a while following my introduction to the RPG hobby. Dad had told me about Vampire: The Masquerade and I had played the Hunter: The Reckoning video game for PS2, so I had a vague passing familiarity with White Wolf, but living in a rural area at the time and not having regular access to any gaming news or gossip, I didn't know that Masquerade was out of print at the time and that Requiem was the name of the game back then. So I eventually went back to D&D and forgot about White Wolf for the time being.

It wasn't until I was in my junior year of high school, back in October of 2009, following my paternal grandmother's unfortunate suicide and a deep slide into horrifying depression as a result that I even reconsidered going back into trying the darker and more Gothic White Wolf settings. By January 2010, I was still depressed but had recovered just enough to want to get back into gaming and other interests of mine, even if only as a brief escape from how sad and miserable my life was at the time.

This was the time of D&D Fourth Edition, considered by many to be the game's lowest point (and while Pathfinder was out at the time, I was unaware of it) and so I knew I did not want to play Dungeons & Dragons, at least not in the form it had at the time and that was when I remembered my brief interest in White Wolf and Vampire: The Masquerade. So, I did a quick Google search and went to Wikipedia to learn more about Masquerade, and it was there that I learned that the game was out of print at the time and had since been replaced by Vampire: The Requiem, which was released in August of 2004.

By the beginning of February 2010, I had done extensive Wikipedia research into the World of Darkness franchise (both Classic and New) and I had convinced my Dad to buy me the two main core books for World of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem and I immediately began reading the fuck out of them both. I loved the idea of a dark Modern Gothic world and I was totally hooked.

This was before I was made aware of the rivalry between the old fans of Masquerade and the few who supported Requiem, or how toxic White Wolf's online fandom could get at times with their thematic purism and obsession with lore and metaplot. And due to being a broke teenager at the time, I had none of the Requiem supplements or any of the other gameline core books (though I was aware of the other New World of Darkness gamelines at the time), and so it seemed that my earliest one-shots of Requiem that I played with my father and brothers more likely resembled the earliest Vampire: The Requiem games from 2004-2005, only a little more action-oriented (we never really could get into personal horror) and not living in the shadow of Vampire: The Masquerade and its success

I mean, my Dad did play Masquerade during the days of First Edition, but that was years ago and he had forgotten most of it by the time we started Requiem and it wasn't until I started to play the LARP version Masquerade following a really awesome Vampire LARP I took part in at a convention in late February 2010 (SheVaCon 2010, if you are curious) that I got into Classic World of Darkness.

From there, I learned of the split in the fandoms and I realized how petty and ridiculous it all was because I loved both Requiem and Masquerade equally, and in all honesty, most of the bitching that was directed at Requiem came from metaplot purists whose complaints always boiled down to "it wasn't Masquerade!", and as someone who has detested the metaplot from the get-go, I tended to find a lot of the stuff that people hated about Requiem to be things that I liked about it.

In my previous blog post, I mentioned why I loved the early material for Vampire: The Masquerade because it predated the metaplot and was more vague. Therefore you could more easily make the game your own. The same is true of Requiem, only more so because the game was initially designed to be a toolkit from the beginning so as to avoid the excesses of Masquerade's later years. While Justin Achilli did fuck up some things in Requiem (such as his insistence on personal horror and the whole "emotionally dead vampires" fluff), the New World of Darkness material overall emphasized the games were a sandbox and a toolkit and not a railroad and that if you didn't like something, you could always change it, such as the aforementioned fluff about emotional deadness, which was quietly dropped from the game after the initial core book.

The simplicity and mystery of early Masquerade is deliberately dialed up to the max in the early materials for Requiem and that is why I love it. It's more localized and looking back on those days, I am saddened that Requiem and the New World of Darkness didn't take off and instead got mangled by CCP and later on, Paradox Interactive (who forced Onyx Path to rename the franchise "Chronicles of Darkness" and make radical alterations to the settings and mechanics) and while I am finally willing to give the new Chronicles of Darkness material a second chance after years of resisting it, I still miss the magic of playing those early Requiem games when all I literally had was the two base core books and we just made shit up and did crossovers with different anime and video game materials and the like.

Now that I look back on those days, I would love to write a campaign or a fan fiction based on Vampire: The Requiem as it existed back in 2004-2005 and the New World of Darkness was still in its infancy. I'd probably enjoy working on that more than I would working on Masquerade stuff.

Gothic-Punk: The Early Days of White Wolf

Alright, this next article of mine is one that I have wanted to do for a while, concerning my love-hate relationship with White Wolf and their World of Darkness games, particularly Vampire and its ties to the Goth and Punk subcultures of the 1980's and 1990's.

Vampire: The Masquerade was an awesome game back in the day, or so I have read and heard. The game came out two years before I was born, and I didn't get into White Wolf until January of 2010, years after White Wolf's heyday in the 1990's. Now, I will be the first to admit that I think the World of Darkness is a great concept for a setting that was hobbled by its own insistence on maintaining certain themes, and in the later years of its run, the demand of certain White Wolf writers (most notably Justin Achilli) to enforce thematic purity through the use of a poorly written, intrusive, and downright railroady metaplot. This was especially true of the Revised Edition of Vampire: The Masquerade, but it also affected the other gamelines as well.

I know I normally try to stay positive on this blog, but I'm going to be blunt and state that World of Darkness tends to have one of the more toxic fanbases in the hobby of tabletop role-playing games. I know this first-hand. You can't talk about White Wolf fans unless you are one, and in the immortal words of Jeff Foxworthy, I are one.

The greater Classic World of Darkness fanbase, including the current owners of the IP at Paradox Interactive, have a bad tendency to insist on thematic purity in their pursuit of "personal horror" and a bad tendency to treat the intrusive and de-protagonizing metaplot as holy canon, forgetting that fiction is not history and the World of Darkness is not real.

Personal Horror is a difficult theme to properly execute, and most attempts at it end up as little more than pretentious wangsting, and people like Justin Achilli and Martin Ericsson tend to forget that.

Now, I have nothing personal against either of these people, but I do have issues with a lot of their creative decisions regarding Vampire: The Masquerade. Luckily, as a Game Master, I can just use the older material from First Edition and just invoke Rule Zero and say that the metaplot never happened. As long as my players are happy with it and everyone is having fun, I don't see the harm. After all, it is just a game and nothing more at the end of the day.

My dislike of the more toxic elements of the World of Darkness fanbase both online and in real life eventually led me to develop a near-comical hate-boner for all things Goth and Punk. Which I will admit was dumb on my part. While I do dislike most Goth and Punk music (with the exception of Siouxsie and the Banshees) and I don't care for the people on certain nameless forums who use their identity within the Goth and Punk subcultures (and more importantly, the World of Darkness fandom) to condescendingly bash others for "playing the game wrong" because God forbid that a Vampire game have some action or adventure, or that a game be actually cool and enjoyable and not just whiny moping about lost humanity, (and may Caine have mercy on your soul if your Vampire PC is a good guy or owns a katana) but to hate on the entire Goth and Punk subcultures or the Gothic-Punk aesthetic is admittedly immature on my part.

The tendency to dismiss the idea of an action-oriented World of Darkness game as "Supers with Fangs" is something I have always found grating, especially given the way things were in First Edition and Second Edition Vampire: The Masquerade. I blame a lot of this on the over-corrective nature of Revised Edition following certain missteps during the game's Second Edition (I'm looking at you two, Berlin by Night and Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand) and naturally I overreacted myself in trying to counter this attitude.

In all honesty, I actually sort of like the look and feel of Gothic-Punk settings, at least the way it was presented in the very first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. The artwork and text of the original softcover corebook for Vampire perfectly encapsulate the good kind of Gothic-Punk, and it can also be found in a lot of 1E supplementary materials such as Chicago By Night, Milwaukee by Night, and adventure modules such as The Succubus Club and Alien Hunger.

I'll admit, I do love the look of the fashions and aesthetics of the Goth subculture of the late 1970's, 1980's, and early 1990's. While I'm more of a bluegrass guy rather than a gothic rock guy, I do love to wear lots of black and gray clothing (they are my favorite colors) and if I could afford to, I would probably dress in an old-school Gothic style. And believe me, I can totally get the cynicism and macabre mindset of the early subculture, I've been in that mindset myself for most of my adolescent years.

But back to First Edition Vampire (or V1 for short), there are myriad reasons as to why it is my favorite version of Vampire, and indeed of any White Wolf game. The first and biggest reason is the lack of any kind of overarching and overbearing metaplot.

In the early days, the World of Darkness had yet to define itself and ultimately pigeonhole itself into a series of cliches and thematic purism as the setting became too cluttered and reliant on a grandiose metaplot.

The World of Darkness in V1 is a lot more mysterious, vague, vast, and less defined. The World of Darkness was a lot more tied into the real world, and while the main White Wolf fanbase may cringe at this, I actually liked the idea of using historical figures as supernatural monsters (such as Alphonse Capone and Helen of Troy in the original Chicago by Night) because it helped remind the players that the game was in a Gothic vision of our own modern world, or at least it was initially.

You had references to other supernaturals such as Lupines and Magi, but they were a lot more vague and open to interpretation than what would occur in the later White Wolf games such as Werewolf and Mage.

Anything was up for grabs and you could easily fit whatever kind of horror tropes you wanted into the setting.

The main conflict was between the Elders and the Neonates, and the Sabbat was a poorly-defined and deliberately mysterious boogeyman wild card, and less of the main antagonist faction that they would become later on in the setting.

The setting was less "evil vs. evil" and more shades of gray. In Revised, you were automatically damned when you became a vampire, while in V1, being a vampire didn't mean you were damned, it just meant it was a hell of a lot easier to become damned.

Redemption was possible, and it was heavily implied that not only was Golconda a real possibility, it was the penultimate step before becoming human once more. Vampire: The Masquerade in its early days was not a game of personal horror, but instead a game of redemption and salvation hidden beneath a labyrinth of Gothic horror and street-level intrigue.

In its purest essence, the style and setting of early Vampire can best be described as "Cyberpunk without the Cyber part", at least on the surface level, and I like that idea a lot.

I love the idea of a very old-school Vampire campaign inspired by works such as The Lost Boys (one of my favorite vampire films) and the anime film Vampire Hunter D where the PC's are young Kindred in a Gothic-Punk cityscape, using the original First Edition rules.

It would be neither "personal horror" or "supers with fangs" but more like "rebellious teenagers and twenty-somethings with fangs and guns" and while I would include other supernatural types such as Lupines and Magi (and maybe Sailor Moon while we are at it) they would more resemble their descriptions in the Antagonists section of the V1 corebook rather than how they turned out in their own gamelines.

The place would be Empire Bay, a Northeastern American city originally featured in the 2010 video game Mafia II and loosely based on New York City (as well as a few other major American cities) and the time would be an unspecified point in the very late 20th Century, some time after Vietnam but before the War on Terror, or approximately anywhere between 1975 and 2001.

The Empire Bay campaign would be steeped in the old-school Gothic-Punk style of the early days of White Wolf and be a loving tribute to those bygone glory days.

I might either run it as a campaign, or write it as an RPG fan fiction. Not sure yet.

RPG Pub: A Shout-Out To My Favorite Gaming Forum

I've been on a lot of forums and discussion boards dedicated to the discussion of role-playing games and I've had many varying experiences, some were good and some were bad. Now I'm not going to go into every RPG forum I've posted on and rant about which ones were good and which ones were bad, because I want to keep this blog a positive one. So, I'm not going to put down or demean any forum of any kind, even the nameless ones that I found to be less than pleasant. Nor am I going to rave on about every single forum that I loved.

However, I will talk about one forum I do love more than any other.

This is a website that in my opinion, is the single-greatest online community for tabletop role-playing games that I have ever seen or participated in. And you can trust your hillbilly on this one!

Of course, I am talking about RPG Pub, where I regularly post under the name Doc Sammy.

RPG Pub

(For those who are curious, the name "Doc Sammy" was originally the name of a Vampire: The Masquerade LARP character I played back in 2011)

RPG Pub was started a little over a year ago, in the spring of 2017. I was one of the first people to sign up for the forum back then, and since then I have had a wonderful time posting ideas and discussing games with many good people there.

RPG Pub is a friendly place, full of free and open discussion where you can discuss anything you want with one major caveat: No real-world politics.

And it is that caveat that makes me love RPG Pub more than any other forum.

While I do have my own personal political views, I will not be discussing them in this post and I will try my best to avoid bringing them up on my blog because this is not a political blog, it is a gaming blog.

The users there are some of the friendliest out there, and I have a lot of respect and admiration for the administration staff who run a tight ship and are very friendly and approachable. I know it seems like I'm kissing up to the people over there, but I am serious about RPG Pub being my favorite online discussion board period.

And while this may seem like much, I am writing this blog post out of the bottom of my heart.

RPG Pub is a friendly gaming forum where I can relax and just discuss my main hobby with like-minded people and not worry about socio-political drama. It's a nice oasis from an increasingly polarized and divided world of social media and online controversies. It's a place where I can feel happy, safe, and relaxed. No worries, just friendly banter about role-playing games, all sorts of cool play-by-post campaigns, and the like.

I figured I should pay my respects and give the site a shout-out and to anyone who reads this blog, I strongly urge you to sign up and make an account!

Tell them Doc Sammy sent you!

Dead Dungeons: The OSR and Fan Fiction

I'll admit it in public. I enjoy reading and writing fan fiction. There, I said it.

I know fan fiction gets a bad rep on the internet, and I'll admit it is sort of deserved because a good chunk of fan fiction of any kind is utter crap (Sturgeon's Law and all that) but I do like the idea of writing fan fiction and I love to read the good fan fiction that is out there.

Yeah, I know I should be only writing "original" stories but I write for enjoyment and not for employment, goddammit!

Originality or the lack thereof does not bother me. There is nothing new under the sun and all that. And I like seeing my favorite anime and video game characters involved in new scenarios not covered by the canon. I especially like Alternate Universe fics, more commonly known as AU.

AU fan fiction is essentially placing your favorite pop culture characters and placing them in an entirely different context or setting. Common AU's include High School AU (arguably the most common AU and definitely the most cliche one), Post-Apocalyptic AU, Historical AU, and even AU's based on popular works such as Star Wars and Harry Potter.

I've always liked the idea of AU fiction directly based on the settings of tabletop role-playing games (such as a D&D AU, a World of Darkness AU, a Traveler AU, or a Shadowrun AU) or alternately, a "Role-Playing AU" where the characters in question are actually playing an RPG and the fic is a "Story Within A Story" with the canon characters' game forming the framing story for the in-character events of the campaign itself, which would be the actual main story.

I've attempted to write fan fiction in the past, and my endeavors always sort of sputter out due to a severe case of creative ADHD on my part and I have experimented with both types of RPG-based AU fan fiction. Some of these I have attempted to post online in the past, only to delete them out of frustration and a sense of not being satisfied with my work or because I keep getting distracted by another idea for a fan fic with a similar RPG-based AU premise.

Well, I figured I'd try yet another time to write RPG AU fan fiction on yet another venue. But rather than try to attract an audience on a mainstream fan fiction site such as Fanfiction.net or Archive Of Our Own and try to compete for views and feedback with more popular types of stories, I figured I'd try and directly cater to my intended audience by posting fan fiction chapters here on this blog.

Ah, fan fiction chapters in blog post format. Probably isn't the first time such a thing has been done, but if I was aiming for originality, I probably would not be writing fan fiction at all in the first place.

In fact, I do have a vague outline of a story I want to write that falls into the category of an RPG AU.

It is a crossover of old-school Dungeons & Dragons and the video game franchises of Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive as both Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden are set in the same universe and feature many of the same characters.

The premise is that four characters from the Ninja Gaiden/Dead or Alive universe are re-imagined as typical first-level adventurers in an old-school D&D game, most likely based on Basic Dungeons & Dragons, Holmes Basic in particular, with some influence from Rules Cyclopedia as well.

I shall call this fan fiction project Dead Dungeons and it will feature four characters from the Dead or Alive video game franchise, listed below with their character classes listed in parentheses.

Ryu Hayabusa (Fighter)
Kasumi (Magic-User)
Ayane (Thief)
Momiji (Cleric)

Of course, I will try to post the first chapter later this week, hopefully soon. I hope you all will enjoy it.

I Love The 1380's!-A Childhood View of Medieval Settings

To anyone who has played RPG's, it is no surprise that medieval and faux-medieval fantasy settings are among the most popular genre settings in the hobby, mainly due to the immense popularity of D&D and its imitators in Pathfinder and the OSR. You have your typical Sword & Sorcery and Tolkien-esque High Fantasy settings such as Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms, Gothic Horror medieval settings such as Ravenloft or Dark Ages: Vampire (the latter of which is actually set in the High Middle Ages and not the Early Middle Ages commonly associated with the term "Dark Ages", but I digress), Arthurian settings such as Pendragon, and even RPG's that claim to be "Medieval Authentic" and try to hew closer to actual medieval societies such as Dark Albion and Lion & Dragon.

But this is not so much a debate on which variant of medieval fantasy or ancient fantasy is better, nor is this a debate on historical realism vs. fantastical whimsy, but rather a look at how I used to think about the idea of medieval-styled and ancient-styled settings as a kid and how that can come into play with RPG campaigns.

I was always a weird kid when I was young. I literally read high school-level and even college-level history books for fun when I was in grade school and I had a near-autistic obsession with learning about different historical subjects and jumping from one subject to the next after I got all the information I wanted. Maybe having Asperger's Syndrome (now Autism Spectrum Disorder) and ADHD had something to do with that, but I'll probably never know for sure.

I had many eras of historical interest in my childhood. Trains and railroads, the Wild West, the American Civil War, Dinosaurs, Cavemen, Ancient Rome, the Celts, the Middle Ages, Ninja, and Vikings were but a few subjects that had caught my fancy over the years when I was a kid back in the late 1990's and 2000's. And I am going to focus on the medieval and ancient interests of mine for this article.

My view of the Medieval world was heavily influenced by a mix of historical knowledge learned from books (and watching the History Channel back when it still showed historical content), fantasy video games and TV shows, fairy tales, mythology, films such as Braveheart and Gladiator, and the typical stories of King Arthur, knights, dragons, princesses, and heroes that permeate our popular culture. I also had a love of Ancient Rome that I still have to this day, and when I was really young, a love of Celtic history and culture that faded away later in childhood, only to resurface when I was an adult.

When I was a very small kid, I had a whole castle play set that my grandmother got me for my birthday, and it came with knights and a catapult, and it was very cool. I had that castle for years, although by the time I turned eleven, the castle toys were long gone and I still don't know what happened to that castle or how I lost it.

We even bought a bag of "Army Men" styled knight figures that came in silver and bronze colors (the figures themselves were cheap soft plastic, obviously) and I remember that when I was a small child and my brothers were just toddlers, we referred to knights and any other ancient or medieval warriors as "Hitons" because they used swords and other melee weapons to "hit on" against their armor in fights instead of shooting at each other with guns like our cowboys and commandos did.

In our defense, we actually meant "to hit against" when we said "hit on" and we did not imply that the knights were making passes at each other. We were very small kids and didn't know any better, dammit!

Even as we grew a little bit older, my brothers and I still jokingly referred to armored knights and legionaries as "hitons" for a little while.

I had nearly completely forgotten about "Hitons" until I was thinking back on my childhood days of playing medieval make-believe with that castle play set my grandmother got for me and my brothers so many years ago.

But the discourse on "Hitons" brings me to my next point. My view of the Middle Ages when I was a little kid back in the good old days was a blend of the historical facts I knew and the fiction I loved.

Thanks to my bookworm habits, I knew that Vikings didn't actually have horns on their helmets and that full plate armor knights didn't show up until near the end of the Middle Ages, and of course I knew that dragons and wizards were not real, but I'd like to think that they were when I was out playing and pretending or daydreaming.

It was fun to blend fact with fiction when I would play games of make-believe or come up with stories in my head while I daydreamed. And when I got into role-playing games as a young adolescent, starting with a heavily house ruled Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 when I was thirteen, I sort of rediscovered that love of the medieval and the faux medieval, as well as a newfound love of role-playing and world building.

And I sort of want to go back to that view of the pre-modern world that I had in those halcyon days where historical fact and gonzo fantasy were freely mingled. Obviously, Dungeons & Dragons (and specifically the Old-School Rules or OSR movement within it) gives me the tools to make the kind of faux-medieval RPG that I would have loved to play when I was a kid (had I fully understood what RPG's were back then, of course)

Personally, I wouldn't mind making my own OSR game that would most likely be based on a simple variant of the old Dungeons & Dragons rules such as Holmes Basic or Rules Cyclopedia, and have it incorporate a lot of the tropes and ideas I had about medieval and faux-medieval fantasy when I was little. A strange blend of "Medieval Authentic", "Disney Fairy Tales", and gonzo weird fantasy.

Yeah, it'd probably be similar to the myriad generic OSR clones out there, but I don't care too much about that.

I might even name the game Hitons for old-time's sake.

Army Men and RPG's

I love Army Men. I'm almost twenty-five years old and I still think army men are cool!

Who here remembers the Army Men? Those little green plastic soldiers from way back when? They've been around since the 1950's and are still a popular children's toy to this day.

Chances are that if you were a boy between the late 1940's-early 1950's and the late 1990's-early 2000's, you probably owned a set of army men. They are a timeless and classic toy that has always been around since their inception, although their popularity does tend to run in cycles.

They were very popular in the 1950's and 1960's, became less popular in the 1970's due to both the oil shortages and general anti-war sentiment following the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and then became extremely popular again in the 1980's and 1990's, though even today they're still around and while there is generally less variety of figures and eras for army men than there were during the boom periods, they are still easy to find in most dollar stores, supermarkets, and Wal-Marts all across the United States.

They're extremely cheap and ubiquitous, can easily be bought in bulk for only a few dollars at most, and are very versatile in how you can play with them.

I played with army men a LOT when I was a kid in the late 1990's and early 2000's (I was born in 1993) and I loved all the different kinds of imaginary scenarios you could fit them into. Hell, even as a young adolescent in the mid-2000's, it was still fun to play mock battles with army men and also fun to blow up army men with fireworks around Independence Day or Halloween or even melt them with lighter fluid. At my house, we called that one "Roy Mustang Fire Alchemy" back in the day.

(On an unrelated note, a good M-80 can blow a mailbox completely over a house. I later learned that was a federal offense. But in Dickenson County, Virginia, that was a cool Halloween!)

The most common army men I had were the cheap Chinese-made clones of Tim Mee's "M16 Troops", who were originally released by Tim Mee Toys in the 1970's and whose uniforms and weapons were modeled after American soldiers of the Vietnam War. (In recent years, Tim Mee has made a comeback as a manufacturer of army men) and other notable types of army men figures I owned over the years included World War II soldiers, medieval knights, and especially Cowboys & Indians, as I was a huge fan of Westerns at the time and I also loved toy trains, and I felt that Cowboys & Indians worked very well with my toy steam trains (modern army men work better with toy diesel trains, of course) and as I have recently rekindled my love of army men and similar soft plastic toy figures such as Cowboys & Indians and historical soldiers, I figured I'd discuss the prospects of Army Men and their relation to role-playing games and wargames.

I am not a player of miniature wargames, although I would love to get into historical wargames (not so much Warhammer 40K or anything like that) and it is worth noting that the earliest RPG's branched off of miniature wargames back in the early 1970's.

The most famous example was the very first one. Of course, I am referring to Dungeons & Dragons (1974), which spawned off of the medieval wargame Chainmail (1971). Other examples of RPG's tied to wargames and wargaming assumptions include Boot Hill (1975) and En Garde! (1975) as well as the unpublished proto-RPG Braunstein (1967), which was originally Napoleonic-themed and along with the aforementioned Chainmail, was a direct predecessor to D&D.

As someone who loves the idea of playing wargames and RPG's with toy army men as miniatures, I have always considered ideas for RPG's that incorporate army men and similar toy soldiers into the concept.

The one gaming concept related to army men that I have contemplated the most is the idea of a role-playing game where the PC's are anthropomorphic army men figures fighting in actual wars. Sort of like Toy Story meets Twilight 2000. A great example of this concept in video gaming was the Army Men video game series originally published by 3DO in the late 1990's and early 2000's. I loved the Army Men video games for the original Sony Playstation back when I was a kid, although the later installments definitely deserved their poor reputation.

I have proposed several ideas for campaigns or even whole OSR games centered around this concept of living toy soldiers, whether it be a campaign set in an ordinary family house in our world (like in Toy Story and Small Soldiers) or in an imaginary toy world (like in the Army Men video games) and you could make the concept work with the traditional late 20th Century styled figures, or with more historical army men types (Cowboys & Indians, American Civil War, Pirates, Knights, Ninjas, etc.) and it would be great.

I've wanted to do such a game since I was sixteen years old, but I have yet to find players who would be interested in such a niche concept.

Again, I welcome feedback and other people's thoughts on Army Men in RPG's and wargaming, or just Army Men in general. Comments are always appreciated.

Introduction

Hello, everybody!

I am Doc Sammy, and this is my blog!

I'm just some hopelessly geeky hillbilly who is a major fan of anime, video games, history, fan fiction, and especially role-playing games.

I am very active on the website RPG Pub and I am also on The RPG Site, as well as the Original D&D ProBoards site (my username there is darien) and on Onyx Path Forums (my username there is Camilla) and I am heading out onto other RPG websites as well.

I am an aspiring RPG creator, a novice Game Master who just started running his own campaigns, and a HUGE fan of old-school role-playing games and the OSR movement in general.

I will mostly be discussing RPG's I like and ideas I have for gaming on this blog.

My Favorite RPG's: Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire: The Masquerade, Big Eyes Small Mouth, Sailor Moon Role-Playing Game and Resource Book, Pathfinder, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Boot Hill, GURPS, New World of Darkness